BlackRock is adding the chief of Canada’s largest pension plan to its ranks of top leaders.

Mark Wiseman will join the world’s largest money manager in September as head of global active equity, charged with leading an ongoing turnaround of its stock-picking unit. He will also become chairman of the firm’s global investment committee – a subunit of its executive committee – and chairman of its alternatives business, BlackRock said Thursday.

Wiseman has worked closely with BlackRock chief Laurence Fink in recent years on an initiative called Focusing Capital on the Long Term.

The appointment adds muscle to BlackRock’s alternatives business, an area it has tried to grow in recent years, and marks the latest step in a years-long effort by BlackRock to improve performance in its actively managed equity funds.

Earlier this year, the $4.7 trillion asset manager combined its traditional and quantitative equity funds into one group that it said in January would be managed by executives Chris Jones, Nigel Bolton, Raffaele Savi and Jeff Shen.

Bolton, Savi and Shen will now become co-chief investment officers of global active equity at the firm, while Jones is leaving “to pursue other opportunities,” a spokesman said.

Wiseman was named president and chief executive of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board in 2012 after joining the pension plan in 2005. The C$282.6 billion (US$215.3 billion) fund invests in foreign and domestic stocks, bonds, real estate and infrastructure.

He will work in New York and travel frequently, returning to Toronto on the weekends.

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Fink said in a statement that Wiseman had “deep experience in both public and private capital markets globally – having worked with and driven strong investment results for some of the biggest and most sophisticated pools of investment capital in the world.”